1.1 About the Enterprise Deployment Guide

The Enterprise Deployment Guide defines an architectural blueprint that captures Oracle's recommended best practices for a highly available and secure Oracle Business Intelligence deployment. The best practices described in this blueprint use Oracle products from across the technology stack, including Oracle Database, Oracle Fusion Middleware, and Oracle Enterprise Manager Fusion Middleware Control. The resulting enterprise deployment can be readily scaled out to support increasing capacity requirements.

In particular, an Oracle Business Intelligence enterprise deployment:

Considers various business service level agreements (SLAs) to make high-availability best practices as widely applicable as possible

The Enterprise Deployment Guide for Oracle Business Intelligence focuses on enterprise deployments in Linux environments. However, you can also implement enterprise deployments using UNIX and Windows environments.

1.2 Enterprise Deployment Terminology

This section identifies enterprise deployment terminology used in this guide.

Oracle home: Contains installed files necessary to host a specific product. For example, the Oracle Business Intelligence Oracle home contains a directory that contains binary and library files for Oracle Business Intelligence. An Oracle home resides within the directory structure of the Middleware home. Each Oracle home can be associated with multiple Oracle instances or Oracle WebLogic Server domains.

WebLogic Server home: Contains installed files necessary to host an Oracle WebLogic Server. The WebLogic Server home directory is a peer of the Oracle home directories and resides within the directory structure of the Middleware home.

Middleware home: Consists of the WebLogic Server home, and, optionally, one or more Oracle homes. A Middleware home can reside on a local file system or on a remote shared disk that is accessible through NFS.

Oracle instance: Contains one or more active middleware system components, such as Oracle BI Server, Oracle BI Presentation Services, Oracle HTTP Server, or Oracle Internet Directory. You determine which components are part of an instance, either at installation time or by creating and configuring an instance at a later time. An Oracle instance contains files that can be updated, such as configuration files, log files, and temporary files.

failover: The process that occurs when a member of a high availability system fails unexpectedly (unplanned downtime), so that the system can continue offering services to its consumers. If the system is an active-passive system, then the passive member is activated during the failover operation and consumers are directed to it instead of to the failed member. The failover process can be performed manually, or it can be automated by configuring hardware cluster services to detect failures and move cluster resources from the failed node to the standby node. If the system is an active-active system, then the failover is performed by the load balancer entity serving requests to the active members. If an active member fails, then the load balancer detects the failure and automatically redirects requests for the failed member to the surviving active members. See Oracle Fusion Middleware High Availability Guide for information on active-active and active-passive systems.

failback: The process that occurs after a system undergoes a successful failover operation. In the failback process, the original failed member is repaired over time and is then reintroduced into the system as a standby member. Optionally, a failback process can be initiated to activate this member and deactivate the other. This process reverts the system back to its pre-failure configuration.

hardware cluster: A collection of computers that provides a single view of network services (for example, an IP address) or application services (for example, databases and web servers) to clients of these services. Each node in a hardware cluster is a standalone server that runs its own processes. These processes can communicate with one another to form what looks like a single system that cooperatively provides applications, system resources, and data to users.

A hardware cluster achieves high availability and scalability with specialized hardware (cluster interconnect, shared storage) and software (health monitors, resource monitors). (The cluster interconnect is a private link used by the hardware cluster for heartbeat information to detect node death.) Due to the need for specialized hardware and software, hardware clusters are commonly provided by hardware vendors such as Sun, HP, IBM, and Dell. While the number of nodes that can be configured in a hardware cluster is vendor dependent, for the purpose of Oracle Fusion Middleware high availability, only two nodes are required. Hence, this document assumes a two-node hardware cluster for high availability solutions that employ a hardware cluster.

cluster agent: The software that runs on a node member of a hardware cluster that coordinates availability and performance operations with other nodes. Clusterware provides resource grouping, monitoring, and the ability to move services. A cluster agent can automate the service failover.

clusterware: Software that manages the operations of the members of a cluster as a system. It enables you to define a set of resources and services to monitor through a heartbeat mechanism between cluster members and to move these resources and services to a different member in the cluster as efficiently and transparently as possible.

shared storage: The storage subsystem that is accessible by all the computers in the enterprise deployment. Among other things, the following is located on the shared disk:

Middleware home software

Administration Server domain home

JMS

Tlogs (where applicable)

Managed Server homes can also be optionally located in the shared disk. The shared storage can be a Network Attached Storage (NAS), a Storage Area Network (SAN), or any other storage system that multiple nodes can access simultaneously and can read/write.

primary node: The node that is actively running an Oracle Fusion Middleware instance at any given time and has been configured to have a backup/secondary node. If the primary node fails, then the applicable Oracle Fusion Middleware components are failed over to the secondary node. This failover can be manual, or automated using the Clusterware for Administration Server. For a server migration-based scenario, WebLogic Whole Server Migration is used for automated failover.

secondary node: The node that is the backup node for an Oracle Fusion Middleware instance. This is where the active instance fails over when the primary node is no longer available. See the definition for primary node in this section.

network host name: A name assigned to an IP address either through the /etc/hosts file or through DNS resolution. This name is visible in the network where the computer to which it refers is connected. Often, the network host name and physical host name are identical. However, each computer has only one physical host name, but might have multiple network host names. Thus, a computer's network host name might not always be its physical host name.

physical host name: The "internal name" of the current computer. On UNIX, this is the name returned by the hostname command. Note that this document differentiates between the terms physical host name and network host name.

Oracle Fusion Middleware uses the physical host name to reference the local host. During installation, the installer automatically retrieves the physical host name from the current computer and stores it in the Oracle Fusion Middleware configuration metadata on disk.

physical IP: The IP address of a computer on the network. In most cases, it is normally associated with the physical host name of the computer (see the definition for physical host name). In contrast to a virtual IP, it is always associated with the same computer when on a network.

switchover: A process that occurs during normal operation when active members of a system might require maintenance or upgrading. A switchover process can be initiated to enable a substitute member to take over the workload performed by the member that requires maintenance or upgrading, which undergoes planned downtime. The switchover operation ensures continued service to consumers of the system.

switchback: The process that occurs after a system undergoes a successful switchover operation, in which a member of the system is deactivated for maintenance or upgrading. When the maintenance or upgrade is completed, the system can undergo a switchback operation to activate the upgraded member and bring the system back to the pre-switchover configuration.

virtual host name: A network addressable host name that maps to one or more physical computers through a load balancer or a hardware cluster. For load balancers, the name "virtual server name" is used interchangeably with virtual host name in this document. A load balancer can hold a virtual host name on behalf of a set of servers, and clients communicate indirectly with the computers using the virtual host name. A virtual host name in a hardware cluster is a network host name assigned to a cluster virtual IP. Because the cluster virtual IP is not permanently attached to any particular node of a cluster, the virtual host name is not permanently attached to any particular node either.

Note:

Whenever the term "virtual host name" is used in this document, it is assumed to be associated with a virtual IP address. In cases where just the IP address is needed or used, it is explicitly stated.

virtual IP: A virtual IP address that can be assigned to a hardware cluster or load balancer. To present a single system view of a cluster to network clients, a virtual IP serves as an entry point IP address to the group of servers which are members of the cluster. A virtual IP can be assigned to a server load balancer or a hardware cluster. Virtual IP is also called cluster virtual IP and load balancer virtual IP.

A hardware cluster uses a cluster virtual IP to present to the outside world the entry point into the cluster (it can also be configured on a standalone computer). The hardware cluster's software manages the movement of this IP address between the two physical nodes of the cluster while clients connect to this IP address without the need to know which physical node this IP address is currently active on. In a typical two-node hardware cluster configuration, each computer has its own physical IP address and physical host name, while there might be several cluster IP addresses. These cluster IP addresses float or migrate between the two nodes. The node with current ownership of a cluster IP address is active for that address.

A load balancer also uses a virtual IP as the entry point to a set of servers. These servers tend to be active at the same time. This virtual IP address is not assigned to any individual server but to the load balancer which acts as a proxy between servers and their clients.

In addition to the terms defined in this section, this Enterprise Deployment Guide assumes knowledge of general Oracle Fusion Middleware and Oracle WebLogic Server concepts and architecture. See Oracle Fusion Middleware Administrator's Guide for more information.

1.3 Benefits of Oracle Recommendations

The Oracle Fusion Middleware configurations discussed in this guide are designed to ensure security of all invocations, maximize hardware resources, and provide a reliable, standards-compliant system for Oracle Business Intelligence.

The security and high availability benefits of the Oracle Fusion Middleware configurations are realized through isolation in firewall zones and replication of software components.

1.3.1 Built-in Security

The Enterprise Deployment architectures are secure because every functional group of software components is isolated in its own demilitarized zone (DMZ), and all traffic is restricted by protocol and port. A DMZ is a perimeter network that exposes external services to a larger untrusted network.

The following characteristics ensure security at all needed levels and a high level of standards compliance:

External load balancers are configured to redirect all external communication received on port 80 to port 443.

Note:

You can find a list of validated load balancers and their configuration on the Oracle Technology Network at:

Communication from external clients does not go beyond the Load Balancing Router level.

No direct communication from the Load Balancing Router to the data tier is allowed.

Components are separated in different protection zones: the web tier, application tier, and the data tier.

Direct communication between two firewalls at any one time is prohibited.

If a communication begins in one firewall zone, then it must end in the next firewall zone.

Oracle Internet Directory is isolated in the data tier.

Identity Management components are in a separate subnet.

All communication between components across protection zones is restricted by port and protocol, according to firewall rules.

1.3.2 High Availability

The enterprise deployment architectures are highly available, because each component or functional group of software components is replicated on a different computer, and configured for component-level high availability.